Ahsenal or Arsenal? |
Did you know that being a football fan can
affect your pronunciation? This is what Jessica Love
and Abby Walker discovered from their
interviews with fans of English Premier League and American football.
They interviewed 20 male soccer fans at a
pub in Columbus Ohio showing live screenings of English soccer matches. During
the first part of the interview they asked open ended questions such as ‘please share a happy memory about your
favourite team’; in the second half of the interview they asked participants to
read aloud and briefly comment on specific English and American football terms
such as Arsenal or Blackburn Rovers, Pittsburgh Steelers or Chicago
Bears. Nine of the participants spoke standard British English, had been
born and raised in England and had been in the US for at least two years. The
other eleven participants had been born and raised in the US and had all been
exposed to British English either through having British friends or colleagues
or by regularly watching broadcasts of English Premier League football. Most of
the 20 participants were fans of both English and American football.
The researchers focused on one of the most
striking differences between British and American standard English – the
pronunciation of /r/ in words like cart or,
more importantly here, in the first syllable of Arsenal or the last syllable of Pittsburgh.
The interviews yielded 2369 words such as this, where speakers of standard American
English, but not speakers of Standard British English, would be more likely to
pronounce an /r/. Importantly, although we tend to think of ‘r’ as either
present or absent, fine-grained phonetic analysis shows that the degree of
constriction that produces /r/ is actually a continuous measure. This allowed
the researchers to measure meaningful degrees of constriction resulting in
pronunciations that were more or less /r/ like, even though listeners may not
easily detect the differences.
As you might expect, the biggest effect on
whether an /r/ was pronounced was nationality: the American speakers produced more
/r/ like pronunciations overall. However, all speakers, whether or not they
were American, produced more /r/ like pronunciations when they were talking about
American football than when they were talking about English Premier League. In
other words, they
shifted towards the dialect they associated
with the sport.
More detailed statistical analysis showed
that American speakers shifted only in the second part of the interview, when
they were reading aloud and briefly commenting on a specific sports-related
term. The English speakers shifted more systematically, in both parts of the
interview. Perhaps this simply reflects exposure to the dialects: the English
speakers were currently living in the US, and it was American speakers with the
most exposure to British English who had the largest shift when talking about
English football.
However, Love and Walker argue that identity
may be a further relevant factor. They claim that their participants were
emotionally invested in the sports teams they follow: being an Arsenal Gunner
or an Ohio State Buckeye, they say, is part of a sports’ fan’s identity, just
like gender, ethnicity or nationality. Perhaps this accounts for the finding
that the British speakers who were fans of both American and English football produced
more /r/like pronunciations overall and had the largest shifts between
less/r/like and more /r/like pronunciations: in other words, they were changing
identities when they talked about American football or English football, along
with changing their pronunciation of /r/. One speaker who was a staunch fan of
the Gunners but not of any American football team did not shift his
pronunciation of /r/ at all.
The researchers point out that to test
whether identity as a sports fan is really relevant, we would need to interview
people about a different topic. Would a conversation about the British Monarchy,
they ask, be as effective in eliciting a shift towards British English as a
conversation about a favourite Premier League soccer team?
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Love, Jessica and Walker, Abby (2012)
Football versus football: Effect of topic on /r/ realization in American and
English sports fans. Language and Speech.
Prepublished 11 September 2012.
doi 10.1177/0023830912453132
This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire
I tend to use more monophthongs (Minnesota/east Dakota style) when I talk about hockey or North Dakota than in the rest of my life.
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